I didn’t grow up in a church-going family.  I went off-and-on with my mom for a few years when I was young to St. John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Boulder, the same church later attended by JonBenet Ramsey.  I have a memory of Father Jim meeting my mother and I at the door when I carried my plaster tablets on which I’d engraved the Ten Commandments in Sunday School.  He cautioned me “Don’t break them,” and I thought, oh, it’s because they’re only made of plaster, and was extra careful not to drop them on the way to the car.  

I also remember a boy named Peter I knew from Sunday School who wrote the Holy, Holy, Holies on his hand when we were supposed to memorize them in order to get candy as a reward.  When I accused Peter of cheating he shrugged it off:  His parents were the Sunday School teachers.  They let him eat the candy after church anyway.

My parents were what a religious person would call “unequally yoked.”  Mom was a practicing Episcopalian, Dad a lapsed Mormon.  Though Dad had no apparent interest in his own religion, he was certain he didn’t want his children raised in another.  To keep things amicable, Mom stopped attending church and so did I. 

For this reason, my first encounter with God didn’t occur at church, but at a seance I attended at a slumber party when I was eleven.  One of my friends called forth the spirit of Jimi Hendrix.  JoAnn warned us that if we didn’t believe Hendrix’ spirit was really there, he was going to come after us.  And so I believed as hard as I could, though I couldn’t see any evidence other than fear to justify that belief.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I didn’t know who Jimi Hendrix was.  I grew up in Boulder in the 1960’s and ’70s, have memories of summer breezes carrying strains of garage rock bands rehearsing in the distance, of passing the hippies on The Hill when I rode the bus downtown and breathing the tear gas that blew in my junior high school windows from anti-Vietnam rallies down the street.  Even so, I was the big sister in our family, who in some regards led a sheltered life.  It wasn’t until years later my younger brother and I began listening to uncut Hendrix on KFML, the FM station out of Denver.  

After calling forth Hendrix, my friend called forth a different spirit.  She sent another girl out of the room.  While Katie was gone JoAnn told us that if Katie believed in God, she would come back into the room, look at the candle and not say anything.  When Katie returned to the room, she stared at the candle as if in a trance for a full minute.  It’s possible this was prearranged and I was the most gullible little girl on earth.  JoAnn and Katie were close friends, almost inseparable when they were younger.  Skeptic that I normally was, I believed this was real.  I remember thinking,  “This spirit is more powerful than that other spirit.”

But this experience was soon forgotten.  It was the fearful previous one that remained.  

The laundry room in my house was down in the basement, which was mostly unfinished and lit by a bare lightbulb.  There was a musty smell and shadows everywhere.  There were other scary things.  A nuclear bomb shelter consisting of a metal Quonset hut took up most of another room.  I occasionally had bizarre dreams about the “shelter house,” that there was a secret door on the other side of it that led to a hallway filled with beds that went on forever and ever.  As I jumped on the beds I always had the sense there was something evil at the end of the hall, and yet I kept jumping onward, forward, from bed to bed.

Sometimes as a teenager, when I was alone downstairs doing laundry, I’d notice a purple haze emerging from behind the dryer.   The basement windows rattled.  Outside, the Boulder wind cried Mary.  Then I heard this voice, “Foxy lady.  Here I come, baby.  I’m comin’ to git ya.”

And I’d be thinking, “I do believe in Hendrix.  I do believe in Hendrix.  I do, I do, I do, I do!”  Then I’d quickly close the lid to the washer and dash upstairs.

I converted to Christianity when I was 17, through a high school youth group I attended at First Presbyterian Church just off what is now the Pearl Street Mall.  I was a Janis Ian fan at the time; I like to say I learned the truth at 17.  After that, I stopped being haunted by the spirit of Jimi Hendrix.  As I mentioned earlier, I’d noticed at the seance that God’s spirit seemed more powerful.  I became giddy about that sense of power.  One Halloween night at the local graveyard I lay down on top of one of the graves.  I meant no disrespect for the dead; it was merely a response to my newfound freedom from fear.

It’s perhaps not surprising I became involved in the charismatic movement in college, in spite of prohibitions placed on such practices by campus evangelical organizations I attended.  Speaking in tongues is one of the best cures I’ve found for my occasional anxiety attacks.  It’s rare for me to have a major event in my life that hasn’t been foretold by dreams or premonitions.  In late August of 2001, I had an odd feeling something really terrible was about to happen in America, a premonition I shrugged off as anxiety, until I remembered the thought a few weeks later, after 9/11.

People ask me whether I consider myself a spiritual or a religious person.  To me it’s like asking if I like Harry Potter better with a wand or a twig.  Or if I’d prefer my car with or without an engine.  I think back on those fragile plaster tablets and those fungible Holy, Holy, Holies.  Then I relive that moment at the seance where I suddenly realized I was in the presence of real power, and I think, why would anyone ask such a silly question?